Foreign Perspectives

“Discuss” is probably one of the worst words that can be used in an exam or assignment question.

Why? Well, because, on the whole, you’ve no idea whether or not your answer is anywhere near complete no matter how much you work on it. A seemingly excellently written answer can end up in fairly low marks whilst at the same time an answer that you might feel is very poor comes back with really high marks.

The problem is, of course, that unless you are very good at the subject you won’t really know for sure if you have included all relevant aspects in the discussion for a start. It is possible to get really high marks on a “discuss” question but, by and large, I think that for a whole lot of people the mark coming back seems almost random. For example, if there are five points on the marking sheet then miss just one and there’s potentially 20% out the window even if you address the other four points perfectly.

And, yes, this post has been prompted by a “discuss” question that I’ve just submitted. I’ve loads of references in it so, in principle, the mark should be reasonable but, really, I’ve no idea whether it’ll be 50% or 80%. Still, one big plus point is that it doesn’t actually matter as I’ve already passed the assignment section of the course.